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It's true that, with phpMyAdmin, there would be no way to tell the difference in the display of a NULL field and the display of a (say) varchar(8) field that contains the text string 'NULL', but I'm sure that the creator of phpMyAdmin figured (rightly so) that there's pretty darned close to a zero chance that anybody would actually store 'NULL' in a field's value. (Though they maybe reckoned without considering amateurs who don't know the difference.)

Personally, when I display NULL in a table dump, I do so using a different text color than I use for normal text, which then makes it clear.

It's true that, with phpMyAdmin, there would be no way to tell the difference in the display of a NULL field and the display of a (say) varchar(8) field that contains the text string 'NULL', but I'm sure that the creator of phpMyAdmin figured (rightly so) that there's pretty darned close to a zero chance that anybody would actually store 'NULL' in a field's value. (Though they maybe reckoned without considering amateurs who don't know the difference.)

Now that I know what is going on, actually, the way you can tell that a Null is a Null is that phpMyAdmin shows the "placeholder" as an italicized value like this...

NULL

I guess it is still sorta annoying to me, since I have a few tables which contain - by design - a fair amount of Null's, and I'd really rather not see NULL in every instance...

However, you do have another tool already installed and that would be the Mysql CLI.

Well, true. But the command line interface reports null fields with the NULL keyword, as well, and doesn't even use some color or styling to distinguish between the keyword and a string of the same value. So it would still have been just as confusing.